Regional and City Planning in the Soviet Union, by Hans Blumenfeld, TASK Planning and Architecture, Vol. 3. 

Hans Blumenfeld was born in Osnabruck, Germany in 1892 and grew up in Hamburg. Although he was expected to follow the family banking tradition, Hans wanted to be an architect and worked as a carpenter’s apprentice. He describes the period from 1921 to 1930 as becoming a journeyman architect.  He entered the US through Ellis Island in 1924 and worked as a draftsman in New York and Baltimore and, finally as a designer in Los Angeles, then worked back in Hamburg and Vienna.

Hans joined the Russian State Planning Institute in1930 where he worked on the general city plans of Vladimir and Kirov. 

Blumenfeld left the USSR in 1937, returning to the US and working as a research assistant for the Philadelphia Housing Association and eventually joining Philadelphia's City Planning Commission in 1945.  His work in Philadelphia was interrupted by a short term return to Germany in 1949, during which he advised the United States Military government about future German city planning. 

The US State Department refused to renew his passport during the McCarthy era and he came to Canada in 1955 as assistant director of the Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board where he was instrumental in shaping Toronto and its hinterland through the 1959 Official Plan for land use, housing, and transportation. He resigned at the mandatory retirement age of 70 and became a private consultant working for clients like the cities of Montréal, Toronto, and Vancouver, and for 14 years with the National Capital Commission in Ottawa. 

Hans became a professor at the University of Toronto, where he taught well into his eighties, and at the University of Montreal.  He was the author of numerous acclaimed articles and books, including The Modern Metropolis (1967) and Metropolis and Beyond (1979).  His most significant contribution was his vision of the ‘metropolis’ as a new urban organism whose unique scale and structure require diagnosis and treatment. 

At the age of 90, he was the chairman of the Toronto Coalition for Peace.  Hans passed away at Toronto in 1988.

https://www.cip-icu.ca/About/College-of-Fellows/Recipients/Hans-Blumenfeld-FCIP-d

• Blumenfeld, Hans. Life Begins at 65: The Not Entirely Candid Autobiography of a Drifter. Montreal: Harvest House, 1987.
• Blumenfeld, Hans. The Modern Metropolis: Its Origins, Growth, Characteristics, and Planning: Selected Essays. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
• Blumenfeld, Hans. “The Exploding Metropolis.” Monthly Review 10, no. 12 (1959): 476–486.
• Mercure-Jolette, Frédéric. "Hans Blumenfeld: a moderate defence of expertise in the controversial 1960s." Planning Perspectives 34, no. 4 (2019): 667-691.
• Marcuse, Peter. "Life Begins at 65: The Not Entirely Candid Autobiography of a Drifter." Monthly Review 40, no. 6 (1988): 43-49.
  

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